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Island Hopping

January 29, 2014

On a recent cruise aboard Pangaea Exploration’s vessel Sea Dragon, members of WHOI biogeochemist Anne Cohen’s lab sailed across the Caribbean to sample the skeletons of centuries-old coral colonies. MIT-WHOI Joint Program students (from left to right) Tom DeCarlo, Alice Alpert, and Hanny Rivera, along with Sea Dragon captain Eric Loss (far right), search for massive coral colonies to sample in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The annual growth bands in these skeleton samples hold secrets of how coral growth in the Caribbean has responded to climatic changes in ocean temperature and nutrient levels over time.(Photo by Pat Lohmann, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)